With advances in integrated circuit, microprocessor, networking and communication technologies, an increasing number of devices, in particular, digital computing devices, are being networked together. Devices are often first coupled to a local area network, such as an Ethernet based office/home network. In turn, the local area networks are interconnected together through wide area networks, such as SONET networks, ATM networks, Frame Relays, and the like. Of particular importance is the TCP/IP based global inter-network, the Internet. Historically, data communication protocols specified the requirements of local/regional area networks, whereas telecommunication protocols specified the requirements of the regional/wide area networks. The rapid growth of the Internet has fueled a convergence of data communication (datacom) and telecommunication (telecom) protocols and requirements. It is increasingly important that data traffic be carried efficiently across local, regional, as well as wide area networks.
As a result of this trend of increased connectivity, an increasing number of applications that are network dependent are being deployed. Examples of these network dependent applications include but are not limited to, the world wide web, email, Internet based telephony, and various types of e-commerce and enterprise applications. The success of many content/service providers as well as commerce sites depend on high-speed delivery of a large volume of data across wide areas. As a result, high-speed data trafficking devices, such as high-speed optical, or optical-electro routers, switches and so forth, are needed.
Unfortunately, because of the high-speed delivery of large volume of data across the network, a device on the network may not be able to timely process all received data. That is, a device on the network may be not able to process the received data at the rate at which the data is received. In order to improve the likelihood of timely processing all received data, one or more buffers are commonly utilized to temporarily hold the received data while the received data is waiting to be processed by the device. However, buffers are typically sized for certain “normal” or expected network traffic patterns, and the actual network traffic often deviates from the expectation unpredictably, resulting in the buffers becoming full or overflow. Once the buffer becomes full or overflow condition occurs, subsequent data may be lost, requiring the data to be resent.
Additionally, multiple data links may be sharing a physical line, and it may be desirable to regulate and prevent one or more data links from consuming more bandwidth than the data links are supposed/entitled to use.
Transmission control in the form of a pause command (transmitted from an “overflowing” receiver to a sender) may be utilized between the communicating devices. However, while responsive utilization of the pause command may be effective for LAN, experience has shown that the technique may not be effective with high speed regional/wide area networks. The reason being, by the time the pause command responsive issued by the overflowing receiver is received by the sender, large volume of data may already be in transit from the sender to the receiver.
Accordingly, a need exists for facilitating improved network traffic control for high speed network traffic, in particular, for high speed regional/wide area networks, such as 10 gb Ethernet (10GBASE-LR or 10GBASE-LW).